What Makes a Good Location Landing Page?

In the aftermath of the Penguin update, the SEO world was rightfully pre-occupied by the effects of Google’s latest algorithm update. But one thing that has somewhat slipped under the radar is an increase in the effects of Google’s Venice algorithm and the subsequent increase of local ‘flavour’ in the results of broad search terms.

Local is an increasingly important part of an SEO campaign for any company with a physical offline presence. With an increasing amount of first page results for broad terms such as ‘gyms’ being heavily influenced by the searcher’s location, the creation of local SEO landing pages is increasingly vital for a successful campaign.

But what makes a good location landing page? I’ve researched some of the most competitive niches and chosen 2 of the top performing pages to see what they’re doing well and what they could improve on. I’ll then provide five key takeaways from my research as a whole.

The Gym

The first website is The Gym. The Gym performs well across many towns and cities for the broad keyword ‘gyms’.

Good Points

• Google Map - very easy to add and is useful for the user, a Google map is a must for any location page
• News feed for the specific area - many companies struggle with creating genuinely relevant, local content. A news feed can work well for specific branches, though it is important to keep it updated

Areas for Improvement

• Content is not entirely custom – all location landing pages use the same boilerplate, this may not be an issue now, but as Google becomes more sophisticated this may become a problem. Writing content can be costly for a business, however the potential return, especially if the power of Venice grows, makes it a worthwhile investment
• Lack of mark-up – the page contains the gym’s address, but fails to use the proper mark-up tags to allow Google to properly identify the meaning of the text. Knowing the address of the business gives Google a greater signal of the page’s relevance to that location

JD Wetherspoon

The most impressive landing page that I found is Wetherspoon’s location landing page. It has a lot of plus points, with limited room for improvement, giving a great example of a good location landing page.

Good Points

• Clever description of the pub’s history – the website gets around the problematic location content by having a blurb about the history of the pub which is engaging and potential link bait
• Good internal linking to local pubs on location page – JD Wetherspoon links well to relevant pubs within the area on the location landing pages. This is useful to the user, not blatant manipulation of the search engine. It’s important not to overstep the line as this will have a negative effect on performance
• Good use of microformat - The website uses the correct mark-up to make Google aware of the context of location related content

Areas for Improvement

• No customers reviews – Customer reviews can help with the generation of localised content and also send increased trust signals, they’re especially useful for drink and food (term used lightly here) places

5 Key Takeaways

Be Concise

When creating local landing pages, the correct balance needs to be struck between being as far reaching as possible and creating a ridiculous amount of pages.

Some companies, especially those who have a far reaching service as opposed to a physical location, can be guilty of creating too many location landing pages. Sometimes as much as a separate page for each variance of postcode e.g. E1, E2, E3 etc… This creates a large volume of low quality pages and potential issues with future Panda updates.

Do your keyword research, is there any point having 10 pages aimed at a really small geographical market?

Customer Reviews

Customer reviews are a great way to a) send trust signals about a location to a customer and b) generate content tailored to a location.

It is important to keep on top of the reviews though; some location landing pages I looked at haven’t updated their reviews since 2011.

Integrate mark-up

Rich snippet mark-up is an increasingly important part of organic search, the opportunity to give Google more information about what your content means is one that shouldn’t be missed. Implementing the correct mark-up has an obvious impact on the SERPs* that I can only see growing over the coming months – to look at the current possibilities check out Schema and remember to check the work using Google’s rich snippet tool.

* For more information check out http://www.blueclawsearch.co.uk/blog/2013/01/23/rdfa-format-data-what-is-its-impact-and-when-should-you-implement/

Get creative with local content

Traditionally, content for local landing pages can be fairly low quality – in an effort to customise each page and keep it relevant to the location, websites sometimes take the shortcut of essentially rewriting the city’s Wikipedia page.

The Wetherspoon’s example shows that localised content can be engaging and can, for the right company, act as link bait. It’s important to speak to those within the business to extract what makes that location special – a long standing employee? Famous opening?

Don’t forget the basics

Whilst local landing pages will be different in some ways, the same basic SEO rules apply to these pages;

• Internal linking - after you’ve created your killer local landing page, don’t hide it too deep, so Google can still find it.
• Call to action – conversions are key, keep strong call to actions on the page, try and auto-fill some information about location if possible.
• <h1>, <title> and URL – as ever, follow best practices regarding use of the location in the title, h1 tags and URL structure.